Analyzing my favorite things

UConn

Finally, part 2 of my women’s NCAA Basketball stats. The above data shows which states the players from the top 15 schools hail from (at end of 2016 season). Texas soars to the top with 20, followed by 12 from Ohio, and 9 from California and Georgia. But don’t forget that the University of Texas and Baylor are in the top 15, and Ohio State is as well, and they recruited a lot of Ohioans. California has UCLA and Stanford. Georgia doesn’t have any schools but have a few close by- South Carolina, Florida State, and Tennessee. So that begs the question- are these schools so good because these areas are hotbeds for basketball talent, or are these athletes a bit lucky to live in an area with a top program, or a bit of both? UConn has been the #1 team for years and they consistently recruit far from Connecticut for their top players. However, they, like most teams, have more local players filling out their roster, which explains some of the results.

The tables to the right show analysis I did combining my Athletes data with my Schools data to answer the question- do players come from wealthier towns, and therefore likely wealthier families? By using school data on the number of students on free or reduced lunch, I bucketed all 99,000 public schools in my data set into 5 equal-sized buckets. Level 1 is the poorest schools, or the bottom 20% (highest percentage of free/reduced lunch), and Level 5 is the top 20%. 43 of the athletes were in Level 5, and the numbers keep decreasing through Level 1. So the answer to my question is yes, players are, on average, coming from richer public schools. And just for fun, I also ran their private schools through and found that the majority went to Catholic school, but that’s no shock given the sheer number in this country.

For reference, the top 15 schools at the end of 2016 were (in alphabetical order): Arizona State, Baylor, Florida State, Kentucky, Louisville, Maryland, Notre Dame, Ohio State, Oregon State, South Carolina, Stanford, Tennessee, Texas, UCLA, and the University of Connecticut.

I compiled statistics on the top 15 women’s college basketball teams during March Madness this year using their rosters. I calculated the average height for each team as well as figured out who the shortest and tallest players are. The shortest stands at 5’3″ and the tallest two are 6’7″. While UConn was the number one team, it ranked 12th in height out of the 15 teams I analyzed. I also did some race/ethnicity statistics based on their photos and articles I found, so it is by no means an exact science since it’s not like they list that in people’s bios (also note that if they are half non-Caucasian, they tend to be listed as the non-Caucasian race/ethnicity). All the rosters list the women’s high schools, so I was able to see what percentage go to public versus private school or homeschool. The majority are public schooled (72%). The 19 “Blank” entries represent the 18 international students and 1 homeschooled student- Moriah Jefferson of UConn. In addition to AAU, Moriah played for a homeschool team in Texas during the winter season. Florida State has the most international players of any team.

On the next post, I’ll share some other interesting stats and charts, like which states these athletes come from as well as analysis using the schools they came from.